From an author’s perspective, there’s no greater achievement than having your ideas become so deeply ingrained and absorbed that people unconsciously implement them. If there are two books that have rightfully earned that status, it would be “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” by Ries and Trout and “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore. 

These books have made a life changing impact on a marketer I really respect, Christopher Lochhead, so much so that he believes any card-carrying marketer can’t consider themselves one without reading them. 

In this episode, master of category design, bestselling author of Play Bigger and host of Follow Your Different, shares how these books have informed his thinking on marketing. 

Three Things You’ll Learn In This Episode 

How to turn ideas into unconscious competence

Don’t just declare a new discipline or new way of thinking, codify it and introduce new frameworks and lenses so that people can take the framework and do something different with it.  

Personal branding is the “modern entrepreneurial herpes” 

The problem with personal branding is that it’s nothing more than a symptom of the “me disease” that plagues marketing today. In a world of influencers, it’s really easy to think your marketing’s about you, but the truth is no one cares about you outside of the component of you that’s illustrative of something they want. 

How to Cross the Chasm 

The most powerful marketing is word of mouth, but how do you scale it? By building momentum inside of an industry, and letting those verticals influence each other. If we throttle hard on certain demographics and even geographics, we won’t usually need as many people as we think to turn a category.

Guest Bio 

Christopher Lochhead is an entrepreneur, master of category design, #1 business podcaster, the 11-time #1 bestselling author of Play Bigger. He’s the host of Follow Your Different and Lochhead on Marketing, and he writes Category Pirates, a top 0.5% paid business newsletter on Substack. 

To listen to the podcasts and subscribe to Category Pirates, head to https://lochhead.com/. 

“The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing” by Al Ries and Jack Trout

“Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore